At the time of the confirmation of Clarence Thomas as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1991, about two-thirds of Americans believed that he, not his accuser Anita Hill, was telling the truth concerning her unproven charges of sexual harassment against him. By the end of 1992, however, the Washington Post reported that the public believed Hill, 53-37 percent.
This is instructive. Once Thomas was confirmed, conservatives moved on to the next battle in the political and culture war.
But not liberals.
Liberals understand far better than conservatives the importance of winning the narrative of every historical incident in the court of public opinion. They never concede. Using their overwhelming advantage in the liberal media, the liberal popular culture, and liberal academia, they simply change and distort public perceptions of historical events.
As George Orwell wrote in his classic dystopian novel, 1984, those who control the past control the future. And those who control the present control what we think of that past.
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This is why I wrote the book History’s Greatest Libels a few years ago. There are so many examples of the Left distorting history for political gain today. The 1619 Project, in which the New York Times is promoting a false narrative of American history so as to influence politics and culture today, is a glaring example of how this is done. Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States is another.
History’s Greatest Libels, first published in 2015, went out of print, but with the recent abuse of the study of history as a method to promote a radical agenda, I got it back in print with Author House, and interested readers can order a copy — print or electronically — through them.
The chapters have a common theme, which is that some historical figure has been essentially libeled in some way in order to promote the cause of the Left today. I begin with discounting the argument that George Washington, justly called the “Father of our Country,” was not a Christian, but a deist. A deist is someone who believes that there is a Creator of the universe, but He does not intervene in human affairs. They certainly reject that God took on human flesh in the form of Jesus Christ, died on the cross for our sins, and rose from the dead.
A review of the historical record makes it quite clear that Washington considered himself a Christian, his family considered him a Christian, and his friends regarded him as a Christian. Washington made many references to the direct intervention into the American Revolution that made it possible for the United States to overcome the might of the British Empire and win independence.
Another chapter covers the accusation that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one child by one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. This was supposedly based on a DNA study done in 1998, which the media trumpeted as proving that Jefferson had indeed fathered children by his slave. But the man who conducted the study, Dr. Eugene Foster, disputed the media’s wild claims about his study. He later wrote that he was “embarrassed by the blatant spin” of an article about the study in Nature magazine that was gleefully picked up by the establishment media.
Foster said, “The genetic findings … do not prove that Thomas Jefferson is the father of one of Sally Hemings’ children.… We have never made that claim.”
One should note that in both of these examples the most prominent of the Founding Fathers are being undermined. But the target is not, for example, Thomas Jefferson, as much as it is the founding of the country. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, and he was simply expressing the views of all the Founders — that the purpose of government was to protect our God-given rights to life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Government does not exist to provide for people or to take from some and give to others, as in Karl Marx’s “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
While by itself it would be rather insignificant if Jefferson fathered children by Hemings — after all, all human beings are flawed — the purpose of the attacks on Jefferson on this particular charge are to undermine the truths found in the Declaration of Independence, and thus undermine the foundations of our constitutional republic.
The book covers other historical characters, both American and others, who represent the Western Civilization that the Left needs to destroy in order to replace our system with their collectivist and socialist system. For example, the attacks upon Christopher Columbus are designed to undermine Western Civilization and the Christian faith that largely created it.
We are in a battle for the soul of America. Unfortunately, when it comes to the battlefield of historical knowledge, we have left far too much of the field to communists such as Howard Zinn and the leftist New York Times’ anti-Christian and anti-American 1619 Project. We need to confront these distortions of history every chance we get.
The future of our nation is dependent on defending the actual history of it.
